Although we waxed skeptical here the other day about Warren Buffett’s just-announced $5 billion stake in Bank of America, we allowed for the possibility that the deal will provide a handsome payoff to him no matter what happens to the bank. B of A could implode, after all, a victim of sinking collateral values for its mortgage loans, and of litigation over its securitized-lending business. There is also the wild card of homeowners challenging lenders in court to show clear title to properties that are in line for foreclosure. In fact, this issue alone has the ability to capsize the global financial system, since “clear title” is exactly what ceased to exist when the feather merchants of the banking world leveraged out real estate to-the-max earlier in the decade to create an $800 trillion derivatives edifice – the Mother Lode of Digital Money, as it were. All of that sum must be viewed at the moment as deflationary overhang, by the way – not to mention, a key stumbling point for those who argue that The Great Economic Crisis must eventually precipitate out as hyperinflation.
So, how do you produce even mild inflation, let alone hyperinflation, with the housing market in a full-blown Depression? Most surely not by expanding the capacity of banks to make mortgage loans. That’s been tried to death – first moderately, then aggressively, and finally desperately — with zero success. Despite trillions of dollars worth of mortgage stimulus and supports both implied and real, the residential market looks even grimmer than it did a few years ago. Existing-home sales fell 3.5 percent » Read the full article
Ackerman Takes a Fresh Look at Old Foe Lira’s Ideas
by Rick Ackerman on September 27, 2011 12:01 am GMT · 46 comments
[Addendum: I misread the date on Lira's piece -- his blog is not one of my regular stops on the Web -- and it turns out that it was written a year ago in August, not last month as erroneously noted. As readers may have surmised, however, that does not weaken or change my argument. Nor would I claim that it weakens his, notwithstanding the fact that a prediction he made more than a year has not panned out. There is a lot of ruin in a global financial system, and although it sometimes seems as though ours may be no more than days from collapse, we all know how even terminal economic dysfunction, like lung cancer, can persist without producing the expected result. RA]
With deflation tightening its choke-hold on the global economy, we thought we’d drop in on our supposed nemesis, Gonzalo Lira, to see how he has been coping in these very un-hyperinflationary times. To his credit, the erstwhile arch-inflationist, bending to reality, has acknowledged forthrightly that deflation rules the economic and financial worlds right now. “Yields are low, unemployment up, CPI numbers are down (and under some metrics, negative) – in short, everything screams ‘deflation.’ ” He wrote those words a month ago in an essay entitled How Hyperinflation Will Happen, and although we are obliged to point out certain dangers in relying too heavily on the scenario he describes, readers should trust, as we do, that he has gotten the big picture right. He asserts, for one, that economic recovery is no longer remotely possible for the U.S. We agree. Nor, as he makes clear, is it a case of double-dipping into recession, as most economists and the mainstream media would have it; as Lira flatly states, we never emerged from the first recession. The inevitable result, he says – and again we concur — is that an epic financial panic centered on the dollar’s collapse is coming, and it will push the U.S. from intractable recession into full-blown Depression. » Read the full article